Beauty, Wealth and a Dead Bride

Shrien and Anni Dewani on their wedding day. (Photo was handed out to the media.)

Both brilliant and beautiful, Anni Dewani was shot to death on her honeymoon outside Cape Town, South Africa during a carjacking that her millionaire husband, Shrien Dewani, survived. The three men convicted of the murder say the young husband hired them to kill his wife. Dewani, a British citizen, fought extradition to South Afria for three years before being brought to trial in October of 2014. On December 8, 2014, Dewani was acquitted and set free. Judge Jeanette Traverso stated at a hearing in Cape Town that there was "no evidence which a reasonable court can convict the accused." Members of the victim's family expressed outrage at the judge's ruling outside the Western Cape High Court.

The names of the places sounded exotic: Gugulethu. Lingelethu. Khayelitsha. Chitwa Chitwa. They created images of beautiful people dancing to the beat of drums on a hot summer night.

To the cops in their dark blue uniforms, who stood around the white Volkswagen Sharan, abandoned in the place that bore the name Lingelethu, there was nothing exotic though about the young woman who lay sprawled across the vehicle’s rear seat. Two holes between her shoulders and another in her neck from which her blood had flowed freely so that most of the inside of the car was covered in blood, told them that the young woman was dead.

They knew her name: Anni Dewani.

They were wondering how they were going to tell her husband Shrien, who had in the first hour of that morning reported her missing and was anxiously waiting at a nearby luxury hotel, what they had found.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More